Yeah, lemme know where I can download the Lynx plugin for Flash... (seriously! what about AAlib? or maybe just an "external handler" that uses SDL:SVGAlib? They ought to write a Flash engine in Java---sure it's slow, but it's portable.)
Bill Beaty's Amateur Science Pages are a great place for this kind of thing, too... Although his site is a little more aimed at electronics, but there's plenty of physics-related (read: explosive) stuff too:)
Actually, tiny ferrite cores used to be used as magnetic memory. It wasn't called "RAM" then, but "core"... it was pretty cool stuff, (mostly) nonvolatile if a system powered off, but when you read a bit you had to rewrite it. It was invented in the 50's I think, and the inventor licensed it to many computer companies and made a healthy profit.
It seems those old sci-fi stories predicting computers of the future to have microscopic core memory (but still core memory) may very well come true;)
At least 2GB is better than the Multicslarge file support situation! Files were limited to the size of segments, which were at most 255K 36-bit words, which is equivalent to roughly one megabyte! The Multics designers didn't consider most users would have to ever have larger files than this. The first database product (ever!), MRDS, was severely limited, so Multics programmers created a (kludgy) workaround. Modern operating systems are designed differently and thus aren't limited to such (small) file sizes.
We have conquered this problem before, by redesigning filesystems to allow files bigger than segments, and we can conquer it again by allowing files bigger than the addressable range of a 32-bit processor's full word.
Actually, I really like changing the aspect ratios. A lot of amateur porn is recorded on crappy cameras, and my monitor isn't quite perfect, so sometimes it can make it more enjoyable to change the aspect ratio. Plus, sometimes sex looks really funny when the people look like they've been stretched out on mideival torture machines.
But you're right, he should've used the XVideo extension (I'm surprised the RPM didn't make that the default?).
Because the Big Five have the bands that People "Want" to Hear (TM) bound up by recording contracts so tight you couldn't fit a splinter of a toothpick through. Bands' full creative and productive outlets are fully owned by the Big Five usually for a number of years, and typically, when the contracts run out, the big label will inform the band that they must either renew the contract or pay off all of their recording bills, touring bills, promotion bills, etc., that the label would generally otherwise pay. There are lots of indie labels doing rather well (Epitaph, for example), but most people would rather hear Dave Matthews than the Refused, and most people would rather hear Red Hot Chili Peppers than The*Ataris. It's not that the indie music is bad (my examples are very biased, though, based on my personal preferences), it's just that it isn't hyped up. You hear the same Top40 crap on every radio station, in every movie, and on every TV station, so of course that's what you're going to want to buy. The Big Five know that; that's why they spend countless millions on promoting bands, especially new bands (people are always looking for new stuff, so if the Big Five can always be promoting someone new, people won't get bored and start looking elsewhere).
Actually, Slack is still pretty alive. True, you may have to understand hard drive partitions and other standard PC terminology to install it, so it may not be for "Joe Schmoe Windows User", but I love the configurability. It almost does not have thousands upon thousands of packages, turning it into a 6- or 7-CD set that requires buying the more expensive 700MB disks. No, Slack can still fit mostly on one CD-ROM, with a few bits like KDE thrown onto another (who needs KDE/GNOME, besides? Ick.) However, I've never had any package under Slackware not work, and the only library problems I've ever had were with freetype1 conflicting with freetype2 (fixed in 8.0) and all the annoyances of keeping multiple versions of qt around because Trolltech can't keep it's fscking API the same for more than two weeks (sorry, any qt fans), but Slackware has never come with anything "broken", which I'm always grateful for. Slackware also does not use a dependency system, which is perhaps a good idea at this point given the state of (most of) the competition (is there anything besides apt that doesn't suck?). Patrick also keeps Slackware-current up to date with security and bugfixes; I have rarely had to wait more than a few days between hearing about a hole and being able to start that service up again. Not as quick as the instant-fixes that paying Red Hat customers enjoy, but absolutely fine for me. Ack, I'm rambling. Anyway, Slackware is the only of the "original" distros which hasn't succumbed to vast amounts of bloat, and it has never released a new release with lots of broken libraries and such (RedHat 6.0 anyone?). Not only is it alive, but it rocks. It's a very quality distributiong for the hobbyist, and I don't think it will ever die.
Hmm, after a preview I realize how crappy half this post sounds. Oh well, I'll post it sans karma bonus:)
What's more important, NetBSD can now support pcloth natively, which means pclothes! And soon, pfashion! They're well on their way to stardom... as soon as NetBSD/catwalk takes off, we'll start seeing ports to The Limited, The Gap, Sears, J. C. Penney's, and T. J. Maxx... Boy, I can't wait for NetBSD/hottopic---I'll about that daemon about metal spikes yet!
In other news, Fig Leaf Linux Corp.'s stocks took a major dive, while Thimble+Needle Webhosting Co. skyrocketed. Red Hat Linux is holding steady, although this may change with conditions in the felt market.
[Rant] "It's possible to be wrong and not be an idiot just like it's possible to be right and still be an asshole." ((Sorry if I piss anybody off, but I have to agree with this AC because I see this sort of thing all the time around here...) No, sorry, not on slashdot. Here, you have to impress thousands of nerds who would never agree on anything even if they were at gunpoint. Most 15-year-olds would rather trust themselves than trust someone that proposes something "foolish," "stupid," "uncool," or "crazy." Slashdot has many closed-minded types lurking about. In a way, it's quite a bit like high school; even here, there is a "status quo" among nerds, and people are rated based on "coolness." Proposing some absurd sort of Beowulf cluster would get +5, Interesting, even if the idea was technically unthinkable, but mixing Windows and Linux would get -500, Stupid. Perhaps thinking "out-of-the-box" is stupid, but it has led us to many great scientific and engineering accomplishments in the past. Why now should it be abandoned so?) [/Rant]
[OnTopic] Windows and Linux both have some very strong features, but strangely without overlap; they tend to contrast rather well, as Windows is easy to set up, easy to use, and difficult to kernel-program and difficult to hack and tweak, and Linux is difficult to set up, challenging to use, easy to kernel-program and simple to hack and tweak. A system that combined these things (a "committee" operating system more than a "practical" one; i.e., it sounds great on paper but it nearly impossible to implement) could very well be the next "killer app," but it would require enormous strides to be made to bring two such dissimilar systems together. However, an examination of PL/I shows that, no matter how absurdly complicated the solution is, some company is willing to throw billions at it to make it happen. I haven't been able to read the article (slashdotted, it seems), but I get the feeling it isn't as bad as the/(great-)+grandparent/ posters make it out to be.
Also, IIRC, Cringely is not one person but a pseudo-name used by a panel of writers. One of them might be a little looney, but the rest might be very well-grounded, and perhaps we are just hearing "Spooky Mulder's" ideas? [/OnTopic]
It may put a huge damper on spam, but it also puts a huge damper on hobbyists. Yes, I learned about running my own mail server and my own webserver while using an AOL account in 7th grade, and I've since moved on to a cable modem... which is another big culprit for spamming. By this logic, cable modem providers (many actually do) should be blocking port 25, but this would mean I would have to pay to get a business account. Business? Hah! I'm not making any money being a hobbyist, just losing money (the old "Why write free software when you could sell it?" idea, but in a different form; sometimes, having the ability to run my own sendmail has given me a lot of advantages I never had in the past: for example, what about those sign-up-with-your-email-address things? Some of them have yielded very useful, but also very spamful. So, I create new e-mail addresses on my system to sign up for these types of free services, use these "bogus, unauthorized" types of addresses for as long as need be, and then get rid of them. Being able to run my own mail server has helped me curb the amount of spam that comes in to my system...).
It doesn't seem fair that I should have to pay for the actions of some spammer who uses the same ISP as I do. It would be like if I wasn't hired on the grounds that I graduated from the same school as some former employee who hurt the company somehow...
In the scientific method (AFAIK), anything that seems to have no evidence against it becomes a law after a while. It does not have to be proven rigorously; that is reserved for the worlds of mathematicians and Congress.
Evolution is difficult to study scientifically because large parts of it are partly based on speculation, rather than observation. Humans can not completely know the past before they existed, but can only guess at one of a set of implied possibilities based on evidence discovered; humans can not also experiment with the past, and since we can not experiment and we are not omniscient, we have to make guesses.
I think it would have been better termed Dollo's corollary (or is that too strong of a word? It doesn't necessarily follow directly, but Occam's Razor would probably lead to it) to evolution theory, or something.
Yes, it *is* the artist's choice. Artists get to choose from one of three options: (a) sell yourself to the RIAA, (b) spend wads of cash letting people know you exist, or (c) wither into oblivion.
Do *you* have wads of cash? No? Well, don't ever try to write music and expect anyone but your friends to hear it, then.
Some artists get lucky and get their name out via the Internet, or sign with an independent label.. but 90% of the artists you hear all the time are formerly-no-name guys that the RIAA noticed and invested in.
Well, I tried straceing mpg123 on an intel box on the files (have yet to try on other platforms), but no sockets or anything get opened. Perhaps they check the parent process, though? mpg123 calls getpid() but never getppid() in my logs, though.
I'm not so totally sure this isn't real. I have mp3's that play fine on my intel machine but crash xmms and mpg123 (but not amp) on sun, sgi, and pa-risc. Of course, there's always a chance that the files are merely corrupted or the mp3 player doesn't work properly on other platforms, but I wouldn't expect *all* other platforms to die like that, at times. Of course, this has only happened with files I downloaded, not files I've ripped. 95% of my mp3's are my CD's (my music is too valuable not to make backups of!), and most of the rest is mp3's I've downloaded when the CD's have become too scratched to be readable, or when it's a song I had on tape or vinyl and didn't feel like re-recording onto my computer. So I may be a bad way to test this. But who knows---if I can figure out just which files these are, I'll try to analyze the crash dumps a little more and see if I can find anything.
Posts like yours keep me from swearing off slashdot;)
Today just hasn't been my day, I guess. I'm in a band, and we're rather good, but we don't have time to market ourselves, so no one hears much of us, which is frustrating, and thus we don't get shows, which is more frustrating. But to top it all off, we are on the verge of breaking up because of some stupid relationship that isn't even related to the band but involves its members. Silly, isn't it.
I keep thinking how my freshman year of college is exactly like high school. The only difference is that I'm on my own, but I was on my own for 6th grade (long story), so it's really nothing new...
Anyway, thanks for reminding me that my perception of the world is more than half of what's wrong with it.
Actually I try to be neater when I write code but I'm lazy on/.. I always use strncmp for strings of unknown length, but this particular strength had its length already checked, so taht's one less compare instruction per iteration (very slight performance increase, but it may be significant in the long run on slow old machines like many of mine)
Maybe we are thinking in different directions. Perhaps I am stupid, moronic, and simple-minded, but if something is in my interests I will do it unless I am told of the negative consequences of it beforehand or I can see that the problems outweigh potential benefits, and I will keep doing it until I lose interest or am told no. I like to explore and I am curious and poke around things. I don't want your "grown-up" world where businesses rule and the government is always right and consists of "the people" (where "the people" are better and more right than everyone else of course).
Slashdot had an article recently on why more people aren't interested in careers in science. To tell you the truth, I'm fucking scared. Engineering is protected because you hide behind a company, and if you do what you're told then you can't get hurt badly. Scientists are always getting burned though, and having their careers ruined. I definitely don't want to go into business because it is stupid and money is pointless and is used to control people. I like music. I want to do stuff with music but you can't make a living that way.
Maybe I don't want a country. Maybe I just want a tribal village. Maybe that would be a nicer way to live.
I don't want big business on the Internet. I want an Internet with hobbyists, personal websites, people doing interesting things without patenting every idea they come up with.
I hate how nobody likes my opinion. Everyone on slashdot is always interested in the "coolness" factor or money or something stupid like that. Everybody wants to do what's right. I just want to be sacrificed or something.
Life makes me sad. People tell me to be happy, but nothing I can afford to do is new research, not very many people are into the music I write and play, and I don't like working with large grousp of people. I like working with a few close friends.
Is there any hope for me or should I kill myself now and make you and everyone else here and everywhere else happier because you won't have to be frustrated with me and you won't have to tell me how stupid I am and how worthless I am.
I'm probably going to start a flame war with this post, especially because it's not very coherent (I just woke up, sorry), oh well.
No, actually, computers *are* fundamentally different. Computers on the Internet remind me a lot of exhibits at museums. People play with them a little more than the museum curators are probably comfortable with, and from time to time they must be repaired or replaced. But they're out there for public access. Computers on a network don't really have intelligent agents who respond to threats defensively.
Computers on a network can also be made into an impenetrable wall. Completely secured code and firewall rules that can handle every possible case make a computer impenetrable over the network. In real-life, every wall can somehow be shattered, if you apply enough force.
People always liken webserver break-ins to house break-ins. Webservers are out there for *anyone* to walk into. That's the point of them. They will talk to anyone without asking you first. They are very much different from houses; I wouldn't want strangers in my house without my approval, especially when I'm not around! People say "you shouldn't walk into doors marked 'PRIVATE' or 'EMPLOYEES ONLY' even if they aren't locked" about computers online, but they ignore the fact that, usually, the doors aren't very well marked. Most computers don't ask for "Administrator Name", they ask for "User Name". Hey, I'm using the system, I'm a user, right? Now I can pick any name I want (I like "root", how about you?) and try to figure out what password I would like (maybe "sex", "love", or "God"?). Suddenly, the computer welcomes me with open arms (I must've done *something* right!).
Until computers actively attempt to differentiate between friends and enemies and actively attempt to defend themselves from attack, I don't consider break-ins, especially to insecure machines or business computers (but maybe I just value individuals more than businesses?), to be a very high crime.
I think the bare minimum computers should do is make people aware is what is off-limits and for whom.
If you left a gold watch lying on the sidewalk in front of your home and someone took it, what would the police say to you when you filed a report? We expect strangers to walk on our sidewalks. People shouldn't expect strangers not to visit their webservers and try to explore them, especially if strangers are not told what they should and shouldn't have access to!
Also depends how he's counting lines. In C, because that can vary so much depending on individual formatting style, a good rule of thumb is to count semicolons. And even then it won't tell you if programmer A is writing fast but hard to read code and programmer B is checking the return value of every system call (as you're supposed to but few ever do), adding lines and robustness with no extra actual functionality.
I *really* try to check return values, even in cases where I doubt the function would ever fail. When I'm on a roll, I just throw in a/*xxx*/ on lines that I need to revisit to check return values...
I wrote a bot for aol instant messenger once that checked return values so much that the code was littered with impossible cases (I called them 1=2 errors) when two successive function calls returned results which didn't make sense (yes, I know, non-atomic, but this was stuff that should never happen, lest the machine change architecture mid-stream, fall off a cliff, etc). At that point, the program would panic and send an error message to the initiator of the last request; if that failed, it would try to IM me (if I were online) with whatever caused the strange situation, and if that failed it would try re-connecting to AIM, and if that failed it would just dump state to a file and exit, and if that failed it would dump state to the screen and exit. The most interesting part of this, however, is one little-used part of the program had something like this: if(a()) {...
if(strcmp(x,y)) {...
} } In my haste, I left out the "0 == " part of the second if() statement. When my friend who was bug-testing initiated some crazy sort of request, it IM'd him back with a very amusing error message (I believe it was: "1=2! They're coming to take me away, haha, they're coming to take me away!"). That was the only time one of those ever happened, though;)
Sadly, libfaim changed its interface, and I don't feel like updating the code... but someday I may.
Maybe his code is very well-documented, and he documents the API before each function (inputs, outputs, all defined behaviors, all possible errors)....
I wrote 30,000 lines over three months, 8 hours a day.... but who knows?
Why would I not be surprised if it was the IE control (with perhaps a hack to disable the stall-on-connect problem when talking to non-IIS standards-compliant webservers), some media player controls, and another little hack which supports gzip compression of webpages?
Let's hope he patented his interface or something, and didn't try to patent uncompressing gzipped files... ugh, intellectual property laws applied to functional property are the most awkward and annoying things in the world; maybe someday I'll understand why patents are good, and how they protect the "little guy" (how come big companies are in a much better position to enforce their patents, then?), but until then...
Right near me is a store called second source, where you can sometimes find neat stuff and get good deals.
Sadly, they sell hard drives for 5 cents/megabyte, flat rate. A 120 gig drive there would be six grand. They don't sell drives that large, though, they only sell drives in the 10MB-1G range (I shop eBay for my older drives, now...)
Now if IDE drives are so cheap, when we will see cheap SCSI drives like this? The only extra stuff is more complex circuitry (which is debatable, since IDE drive controllers are getting quite complex these days). Although vendors want to displace SCSI with USB (slow), USB 2.0 (still not quite as good as SCSI), and FireWire (approaching SCSI in some respects, surpassing it in others, maybe someone could make loads of $$ off of a FireWire/SCSI translator?)
I've used IDE/SCSI translators (the ones by Acard are fantastic), but they aren't too scalable and sometimes give funky SCSI errors on my IRIX machine (although I think that was a shorting problem, as I've insulated everything better now and I haven't seen the same errors in months).
Well, at any rate, if IDE only supported more than two devices per bus, my fileserver could use an upgrade. Guess I'll be buying a many-port IDE card sometime soon... or maybe I should look into small hardware RAID systems? Software RAID can be tricky to set up, slower, etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, lemme know where I can download the Lynx plugin for Flash...
(seriously! what about AAlib? or maybe just an "external handler" that uses SDL:SVGAlib? They ought to write a Flash engine in Java---sure it's slow, but it's portable.)
Bill Beaty's Amateur Science Pages are a great place for this kind of thing, too... Although his site is a little more aimed at electronics, but there's plenty of physics-related (read: explosive) stuff too :)
Actually, tiny ferrite cores used to be used as magnetic memory. It wasn't called "RAM" then, but "core"... it was pretty cool stuff, (mostly) nonvolatile if a system powered off, but when you read a bit you had to rewrite it. It was invented in the 50's I think, and the inventor licensed it to many computer companies and made a healthy profit.
;)
It seems those old sci-fi stories predicting computers of the future to have microscopic core memory (but still core memory) may very well come true
At least 2GB is better than the Multics large file support situation! Files were limited to the size of segments, which were at most 255K 36-bit words, which is equivalent to roughly one megabyte! The Multics designers didn't consider most users would have to ever have larger files than this. The first database product (ever!), MRDS, was severely limited, so Multics programmers created a (kludgy) workaround. Modern operating systems are designed differently and thus aren't limited to such (small) file sizes.
We have conquered this problem before, by redesigning filesystems to allow files bigger than segments, and we can conquer it again by allowing files bigger than the addressable range of a 32-bit processor's full word.
Actually, I really like changing the aspect ratios. A lot of amateur porn is recorded on crappy cameras, and my monitor isn't quite perfect, so sometimes it can make it more enjoyable to change the aspect ratio. Plus, sometimes sex looks really funny when the people look like they've been stretched out on mideival torture machines.
But you're right, he should've used the XVideo extension (I'm surprised the RPM didn't make that the default?).
And what about the audio fingerprinting techniques we've heard so much about? Wouldn't we be able to use these to our advantage in that case?
Because the Big Five have the bands that People "Want" to Hear (TM) bound up by recording contracts so tight you couldn't fit a splinter of a toothpick through. Bands' full creative and productive outlets are fully owned by the Big Five usually for a number of years, and typically, when the contracts run out, the big label will inform the band that they must either renew the contract or pay off all of their recording bills, touring bills, promotion bills, etc., that the label would generally otherwise pay. There are lots of indie labels doing rather well (Epitaph, for example), but most people would rather hear Dave Matthews than the Refused, and most people would rather hear Red Hot Chili Peppers than The*Ataris. It's not that the indie music is bad (my examples are very biased, though, based on my personal preferences), it's just that it isn't hyped up. You hear the same Top40 crap on every radio station, in every movie, and on every TV station, so of course that's what you're going to want to buy. The Big Five know that; that's why they spend countless millions on promoting bands, especially new bands (people are always looking for new stuff, so if the Big Five can always be promoting someone new, people won't get bored and start looking elsewhere).
I dunno, just my thoughts.
Actually, Slack is still pretty alive.
:)
True, you may have to understand hard drive partitions and other standard PC terminology to install it, so it may not be for "Joe Schmoe Windows User", but I love the configurability.
It almost does not have thousands upon thousands of packages, turning it into a 6- or 7-CD set that requires buying the more expensive 700MB disks. No, Slack can still fit mostly on one CD-ROM, with a few bits like KDE thrown onto another (who needs KDE/GNOME, besides? Ick.) However, I've never had any package under Slackware not work, and the only library problems I've ever had were with freetype1 conflicting with freetype2 (fixed in 8.0) and all the annoyances of keeping multiple versions of qt around because Trolltech can't keep it's fscking API the same for more than two weeks (sorry, any qt fans), but Slackware has never come with anything "broken", which I'm always grateful for.
Slackware also does not use a dependency system, which is perhaps a good idea at this point given the state of (most of) the competition (is there anything besides apt that doesn't suck?).
Patrick also keeps Slackware-current up to date with security and bugfixes; I have rarely had to wait more than a few days between hearing about a hole and being able to start that service up again. Not as quick as the instant-fixes that paying Red Hat customers enjoy, but absolutely fine for me.
Ack, I'm rambling. Anyway, Slackware is the only of the "original" distros which hasn't succumbed to vast amounts of bloat, and it has never released a new release with lots of broken libraries and such (RedHat 6.0 anyone?). Not only is it alive, but it rocks.
It's a very quality distributiong for the hobbyist, and I don't think it will ever die.
Hmm, after a preview I realize how crappy half this post sounds. Oh well, I'll post it sans karma bonus
What's more important, NetBSD can now support pcloth natively, which means pclothes! And soon, pfashion! They're well on their way to stardom... as soon as NetBSD/catwalk takes off, we'll start seeing ports to The Limited, The Gap, Sears, J. C. Penney's, and T. J. Maxx... Boy, I can't wait for NetBSD/hottopic---I'll about that daemon about metal spikes yet!
In other news, Fig Leaf Linux Corp.'s stocks took a major dive, while Thimble+Needle Webhosting Co. skyrocketed. Red Hat Linux is holding steady, although this may change with conditions in the felt market.
[Rant]
/(great-)+grandparent/ posters make it out to be.
"It's possible to be wrong and not be an idiot just like it's possible to be right and still be an asshole."
((Sorry if I piss anybody off, but I have to agree with this AC because I see this sort of thing all the time around here...) No, sorry, not on slashdot. Here, you have to impress thousands of nerds who would never agree on anything even if they were at gunpoint. Most 15-year-olds would rather trust themselves than trust someone that proposes something "foolish," "stupid," "uncool," or "crazy." Slashdot has many closed-minded types lurking about. In a way, it's quite a bit like high school; even here, there is a "status quo" among nerds, and people are rated based on "coolness." Proposing some absurd sort of Beowulf cluster would get +5, Interesting, even if the idea was technically unthinkable, but mixing Windows and Linux would get -500, Stupid. Perhaps thinking "out-of-the-box" is stupid, but it has led us to many great scientific and engineering accomplishments in the past. Why now should it be abandoned so?)
[/Rant]
[OnTopic]
Windows and Linux both have some very strong features, but strangely without overlap; they tend to contrast rather well, as Windows is easy to set up, easy to use, and difficult to kernel-program and difficult to hack and tweak, and Linux is difficult to set up, challenging to use, easy to kernel-program and simple to hack and tweak. A system that combined these things (a "committee" operating system more than a "practical" one; i.e., it sounds great on paper but it nearly impossible to implement) could very well be the next "killer app," but it would require enormous strides to be made to bring two such dissimilar systems together. However, an examination of PL/I shows that, no matter how absurdly complicated the solution is, some company is willing to throw billions at it to make it happen. I haven't been able to read the article (slashdotted, it seems), but I get the feeling it isn't as bad as the
Also, IIRC, Cringely is not one person but a pseudo-name used by a panel of writers. One of them might be a little looney, but the rest might be very well-grounded, and perhaps we are just hearing "Spooky Mulder's" ideas?
[/OnTopic]
It may put a huge damper on spam, but it also puts a huge damper on hobbyists. Yes, I learned about running my own mail server and my own webserver while using an AOL account in 7th grade, and I've since moved on to a cable modem... which is another big culprit for spamming. By this logic, cable modem providers (many actually do) should be blocking port 25, but this would mean I would have to pay to get a business account. Business? Hah! I'm not making any money being a hobbyist, just losing money (the old "Why write free software when you could sell it?" idea, but in a different form; sometimes, having the ability to run my own sendmail has given me a lot of advantages I never had in the past: for example, what about those sign-up-with-your-email-address things? Some of them have yielded very useful, but also very spamful. So, I create new e-mail addresses on my system to sign up for these types of free services, use these "bogus, unauthorized" types of addresses for as long as need be, and then get rid of them. Being able to run my own mail server has helped me curb the amount of spam that comes in to my system...).
It doesn't seem fair that I should have to pay for the actions of some spammer who uses the same ISP as I do. It would be like if I wasn't hired on the grounds that I graduated from the same school as some former employee who hurt the company somehow...
In the scientific method (AFAIK), anything that seems to have no evidence against it becomes a law after a while. It does not have to be proven rigorously; that is reserved for the worlds of mathematicians and Congress.
Evolution is difficult to study scientifically because large parts of it are partly based on speculation, rather than observation. Humans can not completely know the past before they existed, but can only guess at one of a set of implied possibilities based on evidence discovered; humans can not also experiment with the past, and since we can not experiment and we are not omniscient, we have to make guesses.
I think it would have been better termed Dollo's corollary (or is that too strong of a word? It doesn't necessarily follow directly, but Occam's Razor would probably lead to it) to evolution theory, or something.
Yes, it *is* the artist's choice. Artists get to choose from one of three options:
(a) sell yourself to the RIAA,
(b) spend wads of cash letting people know you exist, or
(c) wither into oblivion.
Do *you* have wads of cash? No? Well, don't ever try to write music and expect anyone but your friends to hear it, then.
Some artists get lucky and get their name out via the Internet, or sign with an independent label.. but 90% of the artists you hear all the time are formerly-no-name guys that the RIAA noticed and invested in.
Well, I tried straceing mpg123 on an intel box on the files (have yet to try on other platforms), but no sockets or anything get opened. Perhaps they check the parent process, though? mpg123 calls getpid() but never getppid() in my logs, though.
I'm not so totally sure this isn't real. I have mp3's that play fine on my intel machine but crash xmms and mpg123 (but not amp) on sun, sgi, and pa-risc. Of course, there's always a chance that the files are merely corrupted or the mp3 player doesn't work properly on other platforms, but I wouldn't expect *all* other platforms to die like that, at times. Of course, this has only happened with files I downloaded, not files I've ripped. 95% of my mp3's are my CD's (my music is too valuable not to make backups of!), and most of the rest is mp3's I've downloaded when the CD's have become too scratched to be readable, or when it's a song I had on tape or vinyl and didn't feel like re-recording onto my computer. So I may be a bad way to test this. But who knows---if I can figure out just which files these are, I'll try to analyze the crash dumps a little more and see if I can find anything.
Posts like yours keep me from swearing off slashdot ;)
Today just hasn't been my day, I guess. I'm in a band, and we're rather good, but we don't have time to market ourselves, so no one hears much of us, which is frustrating, and thus we don't get shows, which is more frustrating. But to top it all off, we are on the verge of breaking up because of some stupid relationship that isn't even related to the band but involves its members. Silly, isn't it.
I keep thinking how my freshman year of college is exactly like high school. The only difference is that I'm on my own, but I was on my own for 6th grade (long story), so it's really nothing new...
Anyway, thanks for reminding me that my perception of the world is more than half of what's wrong with it.
does it?
;)
*thinks*
Maybe there's a bzip2 proxy out there somewhere
Actually I try to be neater when I write code but I'm lazy on /.. I always use strncmp for strings of unknown length, but this particular strength had its length already checked, so taht's one less compare instruction per iteration (very slight performance increase, but it may be significant in the long run on slow old machines like many of mine)
Maybe we are thinking in different directions. Perhaps I am stupid, moronic, and simple-minded, but if something is in my interests I will do it unless I am told of the negative consequences of it beforehand or I can see that the problems outweigh potential benefits, and I will keep doing it until I lose interest or am told no. I like to explore and I am curious and poke around things. I don't want your "grown-up" world where businesses rule and the government is always right and consists of "the people" (where "the people" are better and more right than everyone else of course).
Slashdot had an article recently on why more people aren't interested in careers in science. To tell you the truth, I'm fucking scared. Engineering is protected because you hide behind a company, and if you do what you're told then you can't get hurt badly. Scientists are always getting burned though, and having their careers ruined. I definitely don't want to go into business because it is stupid and money is pointless and is used to control people. I like music. I want to do stuff with music but you can't make a living that way.
Maybe I don't want a country. Maybe I just want a tribal village. Maybe that would be a nicer way to live.
I don't want big business on the Internet. I want an Internet with hobbyists, personal websites, people doing interesting things without patenting every idea they come up with.
I hate how nobody likes my opinion. Everyone on slashdot is always interested in the "coolness" factor or money or something stupid like that. Everybody wants to do what's right. I just want to be sacrificed or something.
Life makes me sad. People tell me to be happy, but nothing I can afford to do is new research, not very many people are into the music I write and play, and I don't like working with large grousp of people. I like working with a few close friends.
Is there any hope for me or should I kill myself now and make you and everyone else here and everywhere else happier because you won't have to be frustrated with me and you won't have to tell me how stupid I am and how worthless I am.
I'm probably going to start a flame war with this post, especially because it's not very coherent (I just woke up, sorry), oh well.
No, actually, computers *are* fundamentally different. Computers on the Internet remind me a lot of exhibits at museums. People play with them a little more than the museum curators are probably comfortable with, and from time to time they must be repaired or replaced. But they're out there for public access. Computers on a network don't really have intelligent agents who respond to threats defensively.
Computers on a network can also be made into an impenetrable wall. Completely secured code and firewall rules that can handle every possible case make a computer impenetrable over the network. In real-life, every wall can somehow be shattered, if you apply enough force.
People always liken webserver break-ins to house break-ins. Webservers are out there for *anyone* to walk into. That's the point of them. They will talk to anyone without asking you first. They are very much different from houses; I wouldn't want strangers in my house without my approval, especially when I'm not around! People say "you shouldn't walk into doors marked 'PRIVATE' or 'EMPLOYEES ONLY' even if they aren't locked" about computers online, but they ignore the fact that, usually, the doors aren't very well marked. Most computers don't ask for "Administrator Name", they ask for "User Name". Hey, I'm using the system, I'm a user, right? Now I can pick any name I want (I like "root", how about you?) and try to figure out what password I would like (maybe "sex", "love", or "God"?). Suddenly, the computer welcomes me with open arms (I must've done *something* right!).
Until computers actively attempt to differentiate between friends and enemies and actively attempt to defend themselves from attack, I don't consider break-ins, especially to insecure machines or business computers (but maybe I just value individuals more than businesses?), to be a very high crime.
I think the bare minimum computers should do is make people aware is what is off-limits and for whom.
If you left a gold watch lying on the sidewalk in front of your home and someone took it, what would the police say to you when you filed a report? We expect strangers to walk on our sidewalks. People shouldn't expect strangers not to visit their webservers and try to explore them, especially if strangers are not told what they should and shouldn't have access to!
Also depends how he's counting lines. In C, because that can vary so much depending on individual formatting style, a good rule of thumb is to count semicolons. And even then it won't tell you if programmer A is writing fast but hard to read code and programmer B is checking the return value of every system call (as you're supposed to but few ever do), adding lines and robustness with no extra actual functionality.
I *really* try to check return values, even in cases where I doubt the function would ever fail. When I'm on a roll, I just throw in a
I wrote a bot for aol instant messenger once that checked return values so much that the code was littered with impossible cases (I called them 1=2 errors) when two successive function calls returned results which didn't make sense (yes, I know, non-atomic, but this was stuff that should never happen, lest the machine change architecture mid-stream, fall off a cliff, etc). At that point, the program would panic and send an error message to the initiator of the last request; if that failed, it would try to IM me (if I were online) with whatever caused the strange situation, and if that failed it would try re-connecting to AIM, and if that failed it would just dump state to a file and exit, and if that failed it would dump state to the screen and exit. The most interesting part of this, however, is one little-used part of the program had something like this:
if(a()) {
if(strcmp(x,y)) {
}
}
In my haste, I left out the "0 == " part of the second if() statement. When my friend who was bug-testing initiated some crazy sort of request, it IM'd him back with a very amusing error message (I believe it was: "1=2! They're coming to take me away, haha, they're coming to take me away!"). That was the only time one of those ever happened, though
Sadly, libfaim changed its interface, and I don't feel like updating the code... but someday I may.
Maybe his code is very well-documented, and he documents the API before each function (inputs, outputs, all defined behaviors, all possible errors)....
I wrote 30,000 lines over three months, 8 hours a day.... but who knows?
Why would I not be surprised if it was the IE control (with perhaps a hack to disable the stall-on-connect problem when talking to non-IIS standards-compliant webservers), some media player controls, and another little hack which supports gzip compression of webpages?
Let's hope he patented his interface or something, and didn't try to patent uncompressing gzipped files... ugh, intellectual property laws applied to functional property are the most awkward and annoying things in the world; maybe someday I'll understand why patents are good, and how they protect the "little guy" (how come big companies are in a much better position to enforce their patents, then?), but until then...
Maybe you hit the decoy. The real chip is probably hidden deep within a military bunker in Utah somewhere.
Right near me is a store called second source, where you can sometimes find neat stuff and get good deals.
Sadly, they sell hard drives for 5 cents/megabyte, flat rate. A 120 gig drive there would be six grand. They don't sell drives that large, though, they only sell drives in the 10MB-1G range (I shop eBay for my older drives, now...)
Now if IDE drives are so cheap, when we will see cheap SCSI drives like this? The only extra stuff is more complex circuitry (which is debatable, since IDE drive controllers are getting quite complex these days). Although vendors want to displace SCSI with USB (slow), USB 2.0 (still not quite as good as SCSI), and FireWire (approaching SCSI in some respects, surpassing it in others, maybe someone could make loads of $$ off of a FireWire/SCSI translator?)
I've used IDE/SCSI translators (the ones by Acard are fantastic), but they aren't too scalable and sometimes give funky SCSI errors on my IRIX machine (although I think that was a shorting problem, as I've insulated everything better now and I haven't seen the same errors in months).
Well, at any rate, if IDE only supported more than two devices per bus, my fileserver could use an upgrade. Guess I'll be buying a many-port IDE card sometime soon... or maybe I should look into small hardware RAID systems? Software RAID can be tricky to set up, slower, etc etc.